A penchant for modern fairytales

I woke up one morning, and realized I fell out of love with love. When you fall out of love, there are always tears, except this time, they rolled down my face and tasted like water. I felt a bland, hollow, kind of emptiness. I stood there in the shower, in shock, knowing my face was crinkled into crying mode, yet there was no release.

I didn't know that such a low could ever exist. What previously held the record low, was similarly crying in the shower after falling out of love with my first love. What was strange was that for a full six months afterwards, nothing I ate had any taste, but a good cry would fill me up. It was a gut wrenching, emotional way to make me feel alive, whereas the rest of time, I would just feel like a zombie.

This feeling was ten times worse. I felt like a crying zombie, and if you've never pictured that before, and you think it's a ridiculous concept, then you know exactly how ridiculous I felt. The trigger for the tears: a failed prospect. Over a span of six weeks, we didn't have many pleasant shared memories, and I couldn't even put my finger on what I liked about him, but it was the failure to extract what seemed like potential that left me defeated. I craved a good cry and I was determined to fix whatever tear duct malfunction had just happened.

That's how I stumbled upon my guilty pleasure. I needed to find something to move me enough to cry. My netflix queue was filled with depressing chick flicks, yet crying after Blue Valentine just made me feel even more depressed. It wasn't the feel good, releasing cry I needed. What I needed was to believe in fairytales again, and that's how I found stillmotion. They are master storytellers who shoot wedding videos and they've encountered some beautiful couples that are 100% love. It's amazing. It's a real-life love story, and it makes me cry salty tears sometimes.


a RED EPIC wedding // janet + josh in the south of France from stillmotion on Vimeo.

My favorite quote:

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is not love- that is just being "in love," which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.
Those that truly love have roots that have grown toward each other underground and when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from the leaves, they find that they are one tree- not two.

[Note: Most of the quote is from a mediocre Nicholas Cage movie, but it's much more memorable in this context. It's so beautiful that I vow to recite this at any future wedding where I have to make a speech.]